Stop Homework

If you’re a regular visitor to Stop Homework, you know that I often write about what parents are doing in their own communities to challenge homework policies and practices or, better yet, have parents write about their experiences themselves. Many journalists visit Stop Homework to get ideas for stories, and they ask me to put them in touch with my guest bloggers. The journalists then write articles which spur more parents to take up the issue. So please remember to let me know what you’re doing.

Here are wonderful stories about guest bloggers, Frank Bruni of Toronto, Canada, and Kerry Dickinson of Danville, California, both of whom were frequent guest bloggers last year. Kerry was also featured on a local NBC11.com show (Click on “Parents wonder how much homework is too much” in the category sidebar) and is about to be interviewed for a piece in Parenting Magazine.

In the upcoming school year, they will keep us informed of how the new policies are working. You can read Frank Bruni’s guest blog entries here and here and here. You can read Kerry Dickinson’s guest blog entries here and here and here.

New York City has come up with a new plan–to give standardized tests, some as long as 90 minutes, to kindergartners. Earlier this week, the New York Daily News ran my op-ed opposing the idea.

Mayor’s plan fails our kids
BY SARA BENNETT

Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to give standardized tests to students in kindergarten through second grade is pure folly. It’s bad enough that students in third grade, at age 8, undergo high-stakes testing. To start down that path with 5-year-olds is insane.

Bloomberg, in blasting critics of his plan, says, “It’s not easy to test a 5-year-old. But the alternative of not testing a 5-year-old is an outrage.”

Bloomberg has it backward. It’s testing that’s the outrage.

Testing isn’t only useless, it’s harmful. Any parent of a 5-year-old knows this. If the mayor had spoken to parents, he would know, as parents or early child educators know, that young kids simply can’t sit still for a 90-minute test. Nor would the results be very accurate.

The mother of a child starting kindergarten at a midtown public school tomorrow told me that the mayor’s plan is “ridiculous.”

“Call any random person in the city,” she says, “and they’ll tell you no 5-year-old can do that.” She’s right - young children can barely sit still for five or 10 minutes at a time. That’s why good teachers are always changing activities, kids get time to play and teachers ask the children to stand up for a few minutes and “get out the wigglies.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Stop Homework.

And what better way to start off the school year than with encouraging news from an elementary school in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, north of Toronto, which just banned homework. Among the reasons:

* there is no clear link between homework and academic achievement
* poor students are at a distinct disadvantage
* homework causes problems for families, including contributing to marital stress

Read about it here.

With a lot of hard work on our part, we can get other schools and districts to follow suit.

In upcoming posts, I’ll let you know what parents are doing in their communities to change the tide.

I won’t be posting again until September, but I will be answering email, so please feel free to write me with your questions, concerns, and requests for speaking engagements. If you’re looking for an end-of-the-year gift for your children’s teachers, consider giving The Case Against Homework. When teachers and administrators read it, they think about, and change, their homework practices.

This school year, Stop Homework received funding and became affiliated with The Alliance for Childhood. Through Stop Homework, I’ve been interviewed for dozens of publications and radio and TV shows in the U.S., Canada, South America, and Europe; I’ve spoken with hundreds of parents and educators and helped many of them advocate for change in their communities; I’ve organized meetings among heads of schools to start dialogues on homework reform; and I’ve helped educators figure out ways to change their policies. If you need help of any kind, be sure to let me know.

Here are just a few the highlights from 2007-2008:

According to a survey released today by Scholastic, many children in the USA are too busy, too distracted and, in some cases, too tired to read books for fun. Schoolwork, homework and the inability to find a book they like keeps most children from doing more than their required school reading. The findings are similar to those released last year by the National Endowment for the Arts, which reported that from 1984 to 2004, the percentage of 17-year-olds who “never or hardly ever” read for fun rose from 9% to 19%. The Scholastic report found that, on average, one in four children read for fun every day and another 40% read for fun at least a few times a week — but 22% rarely, if ever, do. And as kids get older, it finds, the percentage who rarely read for fun grows from 8% to 37%. Read the entire report here.

Recently, I’ve been watching the lectures posted on ted.com. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that brings “together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).” The one by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher who watched her own stroke unfold, is unforgettable. For their thoughts on education, though, I highly recommend those by Sir Ken Robinson, who talks about how schools kill creativity, and by Dave Eggers, who talks about how a little one-on-one tutoring can go a long way.

One of my favorite education bloggers, Donalyn Miller, has a recent post on the problems with the Reading First Program. In case you don’t make it all the way through this post, this is her conclusion: “We don’t need another reading program; we need to go back to the first reading program—connecting children with books. This should always be our bottom line.”

Reading First Puts Reading Last
by Donalyn Miller

On May 1st, the Department of Education released the preliminary results of Reading First, the federal program which provides grants for initiatives which improve the reading achievement of at-risk elementary school children. The initial findings of the DOE study indicate that students participating in Reading First perform no better on reading achievement tests than their peers in other instructional programs. Instead of re-addressing the flawed premise on which Reading First was built, the 2000 Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read, policymakers ask for more money to fund this failing federal program and beg us all to give Reading First more time.

Read the rest of this entry »

I really liked this comment posted by a teacher in response to my blog entry, Middle School Teacher Says There’s Plenty of Time For Homework.

As both a parent and a teacher, what bothers me most is the middle school teacher’s claim that parents who schedule after school activities are saying “athletic achievement and ‘well-roundedness’ are more important than school.”

It is a sad state of affairs when ‘well-roundedness’ and education have become mutually exclusive concepts.

Our society needs to recognize that more goes into raising a healthy, productive member of society than memorizing math facts or completing reading logs. Do we want a longer school day that offers every conceivable enrichment activity a child might be interested in? Or are we willing to allow families to make those choices on their own, based on their children’s needs and interests. If we claim that we are, we must support this by allowing enough “free time” after school for pursuing these enrichment activities without sacrificing sleep for homework.
Read the rest of this entry »